Ghost 2003 locks my laptop after cloning image

I want to clone an image of my laptop hard drive to an external USB drive to use for future restoration. Laptop running 2000 pro. Ghost seems to be working OK until it has finished the clone, but does not give me a prompt to restart. I just get a dark screen and have to pull the battery and unplug the power cord to restart windown. Upon restarting, I get an announcement that the active desktop needs fixed.I can restore the active desktop by clicking on the restore button. I am not using a boot disk. I’m just going from the Ghost program.